Multi-party communication has long been an enjoyable form of various individuals to share information with each other. Early forms of this communication included citizen band (CB) radios, where users were able to transmit and receive messages over a defined distance. Users could openly talk with other users on various channels, where these channels were dictated by radio frequencies.
A common utilization of this type of multi-party communication was for road travelers, including semi drivers and hobbyists. For instance, truck drivers could share information about traffic issues within a particular distance. Other uses include hobbyists having random conversations with other users from their home radios.
As technology has evolved, so has the ability to enhance these multi-channel communication techniques. One common limitation was requiring users to have CB radios to communicate, thus users had to purchase a radio, then having the radio and antenna installed. One common improvement is the utilization of common radio transmission devices, cellular phones, to generate the communications. U.S. Pat. No. 6,477,366 describes using a cellular telephone, which is a radio transmitter, as a means for generating CB-band communications. This patent technique solved the problem of CB radio equipment, but failed to expand the geographic scope of such communication. This patent technique uses cell phone towers as the repeater to transmit the radio signal to other cellular telephones, but the communicating cellular telephones are required to be within the reach of the same cell phone tower. Therefore, while this technique replaces the CB radio with a cellular telephone, the broadcast range is still significantly reduced.
Further improvements have been attempted, as described in U.S. patent application Ser. No. 12/701,765, Publication No. 2011/0196969. This technique seeks to improve the geographic scope of CB radio communication by engaging the vehicle in-dash communication system with a wireless network connected to a wide area network backbone. This published application fails to improve any functionality of the user interface and user communication experience, rather merely enhances the geographic scope of communication from U.S. Pat. No. 6,477,366 by using the Internet as a communication backbone. The published application provides for all user functionality and interface to be pre-loaded in the vehicle in-dash display. Moreover, the published application provides a direct connection socket for video and audio communication without any management of the communication across the channel. Therefore, in this system with multiple users, concurrent talking will be undetectable, a wall of noise between the users.
A basic tenant of the CB radio communication is the line engagement to speak, but muting or line disengagement when not speaking. This provides for structured communication between the parties as a side benefit of the original limitation of the radio antenna being unable to concurrent transmits and receives. Rather, the published application 2011/0196969 uses the concept of a CB radio as a pretext for seeking establishment of a car-based open socket video chat session.
Therefore, there exists a need for a method and system that both eliminates the equipment requirements for multi-party communication, relying on existing mobile computing platform(s), and expands the geographic scope of true multi-party communication. Moreover, there exists a need for the network-based functionality to enable such multi-party communication maintain a thin client.